Thank You Great Grandma!!!

My Grandma K. sent the most incredible baby gift and it got here just in time! She is an amazing quilter and this is another one of her masterpieces. They really are too beautiful to use on stinky babies.
Also, we finally let Cate hold Abigail. She has been sick (of course) with a fever and cough so we have been making her stay away. She was thrilled when I let her get close but actually isn't all that interested.
Tasty baby.
I don't know why the pictures are so grainy, for some reason they sometimes come that way when I upload them. Does anyone have a solution?

39 weeks

I realize that this is weird to add a picture of me before I had the baby since she's here now, but this is my final picture in my lovely pregnancy series. I completely forgot to take the striped shirt in the bathroom picture last week. Saturday night we had Doodles Italian Ice (I had German Chocolate and it was divine but not better than lemon). And did I mention that Justin (YES BYU friends, Justin N.) was visiting us? Or that he was here helping with tornado clean up? And that Lewis was supposed to drive him back to Jasper (an hour away) on Sunday morning? Or that he was just going to take Lewis' car since my water broke in the middle of the night? Or that I had both keys to Lewis' car in my purse at the hospital? No? Well, it's a good story I will have to tell you sometime and it includes me yelling at Lewis because he was on the phone trying to coordinate getting the keys home to Justin while I was using every ounce of willpower I had to keep from pushing before the doctor came in to deliver. It was so fun to catch up with Justin and hopefully it won't be another 10 years before we see him again!

May 15, 2011

At around 1am Sunday morning my water broke. I woke Lewis up and we were off to the hospital. It took a while for my contractions to get going, but she was born at 6:41 am. I tried to get an epidural, but it wasn't very effective. It mainly worked on my left thigh, I got to feel the rest. The umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around her neck so she was quite blue when she first came out. After a bout a half an hour of frantic activity by lots of doctors and nurses she stopped grunting and started breathing well. Her color improved but she was really swollen still and her face was bruised. She couldn't even really open her eyes for the first day or so. Now she's much better. We are thrilled to have this sweet new baby in our home.















Deanne Abigail
born at 6:41 am
May 15, 2011
7 lbs. 8 oz. 19.5 inches

"Cinderina"

A had her ballet recital last Saturday and she did a great job. This was most likely her last ballet recital because she wants to do soccer next year and that alone will be 3 days a week. Add piano lessons (if we actually get one) and we're pretty much maxed out.
Here are a few pictures from her dress rehearsal:



and one from after her performance (with her teacher who also happened to be Cate's teacher):

38 weeks

Pretty soon someone's gonna have to come roll me outta here. Next Thursday is my due date. What is your prediction? Will I make it to the 19th or beyond?!?!?

Day of Service

Our church has been planning a day of service for many months. Today just happens to be that day. We had several bales of clothing and lots of non perishable food shipped in from Salt Lake City that we set up and are distributing at the Greater Birmingham Ministries today. The timing couldn't be more perfect.
Also, we had planned on helping the city of Vestavia Hills parks department by cleaning up and placing pine straw (what they use here instead of bark) around trees and in flower beds, etc. Because of all the trees that came down in Vestavia in the Wednesday morning storm they asked us to instead go over to one of the elementary schools and work on cleaning up around the school, at the baseball fields, and the playground. We were only able to stay for a short time because Aiden had a soccer game at 9 am, but we were completely blown away by what we found.




Much of the city is in this sort of shape, but I took some pictures of what we saw just in Cahaba Heights. There are streets that have trees down in every single yard. On every single house. Smashed cars and houses everywhere. Downed power lines. All you can hear is chainsaws buzzing. It is like nothing I have ever seen before. It is hard to capture it with pictures taken from the window of a moving car, but I wanted to post some pictures anyway. Birmingham is such a heavily wooded area, there is just no escaping the trees when an angry storm like this blows in. (Most of these pictures were taken on the same street about a quarter of a mile long but I could have gone on and on. The entire subdivision of Cahaba Heights looks like this. Also important to note: the photos were mostly taken by Brooks whose eye level is below the window :) . ) We are feeling even more lucky this morning.